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In March 2015, a violent, hysterical mob beat, torched, and killed a woman, ran her over with a car, made her face unrecognizable, and threw her corpse in the Kabul river. Thousands of onlookers watched on like it was a spectacle to be enjoyed, not intervening, and hence, adding to the brutality.

The woman’s crime? “Burning the Quran”—which, as substantial evidence proved later, was an entirely false allegation.

The murder of Farkhunda Malikzada, an Afghan religious scholar who had dedicated her life to fighting superstitions within the religious community, shocked the world in March 2015. She was killed by a group of more than 100 men who beat her to death, ran her over with a car and then set her on fire. She was killed because a senior religious cleric falsely accused her of burning the Quran, according to the BBC.After her death, protests were held to demand justice in Afghanistan and around the world. Despite global and national efforts, the trial for Malikzada was called a failure by many activists because several killers and policemen who watched the murder were recently acquitted.

Staff from WLUML's International Coordination Office in London joined with the Women In Black to hold a vigil drawing attention to the UK government’s complicity in human rights abuses in Sudan, and abuses against women in particular.

Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) are an important pillar of the human rights framework and the below average results in this area are a poor reflector on the general human rights situation in Pakistan.